I've seen it come up in a few places, figure to start a fresh thread for it- end game buildings are typically both weak and situational, with mid-game buildings usually being the better choice for any given strategy, even if they provide effects secondary to that strategy. End game buildings are generally those in the last concentric ring of the tech wheel, while mid-game buildings are the two rings immediately within that ring. How can we fix this?

Personally I am of the opinion that this should be reversed; the mid-game is when we should be specializing into particular strategies where situational effects are best, with the greatest number of options to choose from, while late game buildings should provide greater percentage bonuses to help us further utilize our earlier situational decisions. Mid-game should allow us to form our playstyle through situational bonuses, while late-game should provide us with the powerful multiplicative boosts needed to leverage our earlier situational bonuses into a final push towards victory.

For example, the final two Influence improvements are generally maligned. The first provides a meager 10% bonus to our already generally low Influence production, while the second provides a similarly meager and situational 10-15% Influence bonus for being in Peace or Alliance, when the end game typically sees positive relations plummeting and reorganizing as people scramble for victories or split apart over the Academy quest. The bonuses are backwards; instead, the first improvement should provide a flat Influence bonus from each of our good diplomatic relations to reward our efforts at forming them, while the second improvement should provide a much larger non-situational percentage bonus to help us leverage our strategy into a victory later on.

Most end-game techs should provide a way to leverage our earlier situational bonuses and decisions into a tangible victory condition; Food-Industry conversion does this excellently, while Approval bonuses generally do not, as Approval is capped and likely already taken care of by the end-game, where what we really need is a tangible reward for our excellent Approval management, much like the Happiness buildings in Endless Legend, which always came with a bonus for Happy cities.

Any other examples or ways in which end-game improvements could be made suitably powerful?

One of the craziest examples for me is the "Chaotic Meteorology" tech. T5, and gives you

a) Cultivation Institute +10 food per planet, and +10% for 4480 production plus 25 Quadrinix and

b) Cloud seeding swarms: +20 food per Gas and Lunar anomaly for 4480 production. What. This will almost always be less powerful than the T1 sustainable farms.

I have never, ever run in a situation where I actually needed food at that point of the game, so this will usually be converted to production via Biofuel. But considering that you can get +5 production per pop, per strategic ressource for the same price, or +4 per pop and +10% production for about half(!), this tech is completely laughable.

One fix would be to alter this into a conversion of unneeded food to dust and/or science, similar to the biofuel factory. 

The change I would like to see most is an increase in food consumption and terraforming costs, so that you actually have to invest to be able to fully fill out a system.

Then it could be made the T3 tech continuation of "Botanical scanning" with lower costs.

Other late game techs that currently seem really underpowered: 

-Low-Kelvin-Sciences (I still do not understand what "allows discovery of nodes unconnected to hyperlanes" even means, but I can guess that it's less powerful than, say, +40% science),

-Adaptive colonies (+ food late game has the problems described above),

-Advanced Non-Baryonics (+10% science, +20% per war is a nice idea, but I feel that usually warring empires won't get to the T5 tech sector, and non-warring ones will just research genius of the endless. It should be a lower tier tech, perhaps an alternative to the F-reality institute, or the optic research lab, for the warmongers.)

- Hyperfield Generators (manpower and fleet shield module are both not a priority) and

- War as a hobby -- I have yet to find a practical use for the planet cracker, other than watching the very nice animiation and/or completing the Vodyani campaign.

I would personally move N-dimensional topologies and Climate Engineering to T5, since they both offer significant advantages that feel like they should be reserved for the scientifically advanced societies, and Advanced non-Baryonics and Ontological Rev-Eng (negative anomaly reduction), which seem far less powerful, to T4.

Aitarus wrote:

I can't say I agree with this - while the instinct may be to ask for exponentially powerful buildings, I think it's worth considering that due to the amounts of FIDSI that will be stacked by late game a 10% bonus is an attractive one, as is any raw +4 or +5 I'd have thought. The late tier resources are fairly abundant, and these improvements don't often come into play. Part of the reason I'm content with them how they are is that having way stronger improvements late game just allows for more snowballing for anyone who acquires that one tech. 

Regarding Super Biofuel Plant, that's actually a good instance where it's way overtuned. The conversion should be reduced to 50% like all the other infinite resource converters, and it'd still be one of if not the most game changing improvement in the game. As it is, the food empires are ironically better at industry late game than the industry ones. Due to this, food is still valuable late game as it becomes industry.

Cloud Seeding Swarms definitely calls for a buff. 

War as Hobby is actually useful now there are new deed rewards - have you played since the Statecraft update? Some of them are appealing enough to consider destroying four planets for sure.

I agree that +10% late game can be really strong; I do think that Distributed Energy is in an OK place, even if I feel it should be half-priced in production, while microwave pipes should be doubled. However, +10% production or +40% science will still almost universally be better than +10% food, especially late game, and for half the price.

I think part of the food abundance/biofuel problem is also just that 

a) happiness is (a bit) too easy too achieve, and its bonuses are too high; "ecstatic" should not be my standard state, and perhaps be nerfed to +15/+20%.

b) terraforming is too easy/cheap and

b) inherent food bonuses of too many pops are too high. Compare +1/ situational +4 from sophons and lumeris to always +3 from horatio, always+5 food from Amoeba and+7 (!) food from unfallen on fertile. And don't even get me started on spliced Horatio :-). For buildings, values seem to be roughly equal in food/science/prod, +10 per planet and +4 per pop for most buildings, but for populations food bonuses seem way more numerous, and way higher, than any other. I'm not sure why.

Aitarus wrote:

I can't say I agree with this - while the instinct may be to ask for exponentially powerful buildings, I think it's worth considering that due to the amounts of FIDSI that will be stacked by late game a 10% bonus is an attractive one, as is any raw +4 or +5 I'd have thought. The late tier resources are fairly abundant, and these improvements don't often come into play. Part of the reason I'm content with them how they are is that having way stronger improvements late game just allows for more snowballing for anyone who acquires that one tech. 

I'm not talking about creating an exponentially positive curve, but just not having a declining curve, as well as putting the fun situational stuff where we can get at it. In the case of science, we have a mid game improvement providing a whopping +40% Science, but then its end game successor provides +10% Science and an unreliable stacking +20% Science bonus which would have produced more interesting effects and behaviors earlier in the game. Influence jumps the gun by adding percentage bonuses before it's provided enough strong base numbers to apply them to, so +100% of near-nothing is still near-nothing. Industry gets a really nice +4 RAW, +10% Industry improvement, which is then followed by an improvement with +5 (+10??) Industry conditional upon strategic deposits, making it weaker than it sounds once you account for most planets in a system not having strategic deposits. End-game conditional Approval is just silly and useless.

My problem with end-game buildings is that a lot of them- not all, but a lot- seem to either provide a decent bonus when its usefulness has passed, a bonus that comes off as unusually weak compared to its predecessors, or a situational bonus that would have been way more fun and interesting as an earlier, cheaper tech. I don't want more power, but the power at play I believe is in most cases out-of-alignment with its cost and timing such that a lot of techs still seem like they'll never, ever be a good idea.

As to Food, while this has inspired me to throw some possible new mechanics at the Community Mod Project, I'd really prefer to keep the focus on the balancing of Stage 5 improvements in comparison to the techs that come before them. Food was already talked to death in my last big thread, which gave birth to said Community Mod Project. Making Population growth through Food go much more slowly, as that mod does, goes a long way to making Food conversion less overtuned, I find.

I can agree with some redistribution of building effects, but unreliable as % per war may seem, it is an incredibly powerful bonus if applied contextually and I think some of the strategic improvements should have these sort of dynamic effects. The Ministry of Truth is another good example - in my modding (still testing) I've made it 5% industry per war, perhaps even that is too low since it's a late-game wonder on one system, but dynamic effects are cool. 

You want more production/science? Well, defend yourself from half the galaxy. It certainly makes sense that since there are so many per peace/alliance improvements, there should be some per war. And stacking these is potent.

The F-Reality Institute is way overtuned, that's another I didn't mention. Actually about to nerf that now.

The paradigm of situational bonuses actually works well for the fifth-ring, because everyone wants to be sprinting towards their particular victory condition at that point of the game. By the time that you can research them, you're building what you need to win the game (Wonder victory), researching what you need to win the game (Science), wanting direct and immediate boosts to your fleets' strength (military victories and presumably multiplayer), or just a few turns away from setting all your systems to run industry->Dust conversion (Economic). Improvements need to be both extraordinarily powerful and well-suited to your situation to be worth researching. Even Super Biofuel Factory, worth so many hundreds of industry that it can pay for itself in a single-digit number of turns on normal speed, is a questionable choice for most strategies and a modest boost to the ones that use it; once you can start building it, your wonders are likely a single-digit number of turns from completion.

I'd like to see every such improvement brought up to the level of Super Biofuel Factory, but even that would leave many of them only worth researching in specific circumstances. High Serenity Program could just set its system to 100% approval and still only be useful to warmongers and Cravers, and then only sometimes. Likewise you could multiply Intergalactic Lectures' bonuses by ten, and most factions still wouldn't spend their precious research unlocking it because the marginal value of influence is just so low by the end of the game. It would end up the domain of the United Empire and pacific conversion gambits. It's the same even with improvements with more broadly useful bonuses and fourth-ring improvements that you could shuffle to the fifth ring: better to directly research what you want than research a science improvement and then research it for any victory except Science, dust improvements are of limited value to everyone not going for an Economic victory, food improvements are useful exclusively as a way to increase industry in conjunction with Super Biofuel Factory, even industry isn't that great because strategic resources and the research needed to unlock things to build tend to be a bigger constraint on what you can build than industry cost in any system that can afford the 4480 industry for a fifth-ring improvement.

So let's talk about fourth-ring improvements, which are easier to make worthwhile. Some already are: Microwave Pipes and F-Reality institute are both in good places balance-wise, the trade-route boosting improvements seem to be working out ok and Fabrication Licensce might have its place, even if that place is a small niche that's really weird for an industry improvement. Two others could get by with numbers tweaks:

-Dark Matter Institute needs a big boost. This owes a lot to the nature of fourth-ring science improvements. Players going for a Science victory are well-served by running the mandatory scientist law and skipping as many fourth-ring techs as possible to keep their research costs down, while other players don't particularly need to unlock the fifth section of the bottom quadrant and so also want to avoid fourth-ring Science and Exploration techs that aren't really good. The high value of F-Reality Institute means that Dimensional Folding Clears this bar. Ultra-Deep Habitats doesn't. Level 4 curiousities don't seem common or valuable enough to justify the tech on their own, and an improvement that can only be built once and gives 200-300 science for more than 6000 industry would be a low-priority build even if it didn't take a tech to unlock. My preference would be to triple the Institute's science output.

-Punctuated Evolution Foundation could stand to be stronger. Terraforming to fertile is expensive enough and tends to decrease per-pop yields of science and industry by enough to make doing it (and hence researching Climate Engineering) an iffy call. If PEF were stronger, it could help justify the tech and incentivize terraforming by doing more for the science yields of fertile planets. At least a 50% increase to +6 science per pop on fertile and +3 on cold is warranted, and a bigger one migh be advisable. The point of comparison here is Microwave Pipes, which is worth a total of +10 FIDSI per pop on every planet and on a tech that almost everyone wants because it unlocks quadrinix. We want Microwave Pipes to be stronger since it costs strategic resources, but we could double the bonus of PEF and it would still be considerably weaker than Microwave Pipes because of the influence that it gives (far more valuable per point than the FIDS until you have a influence surplus) and the fact that PEF only gives its full bonus on boreal worlds, which are pretty rare.

The dust improvements are in a bad place. This is partly a symptom of the way that the game tries to treat a point of dust as though it's almost as valuable as a point of industry (it really, really isn't) and partly an artifact of the victory conditions. The only time one wants a large surplus of dust (large enough to, say, justify spending thousands of industry per system on fourth-ring improvements) is when pursuing an Economic victory. The Economic victory, however, encourages a heavy specialization in trade routes, and all the trade-route boosting techs are in competition with the dust-production techs (very directly in the case of Optimized Logistics and Mineral Manipulation). A numbers boost could fix the game's undervaluing of dust, but it will at best change which of the fourth-ring Economy and Trade techs are second-tier when going for an economic victory.

A few of the remaining improvements might be salveagable.

-Farsighted Crops cannot support its own tech. As people before me in the thread have pointed out, food is not something needed in a late-game system building expensive improvements. No matter how strong Farsighted Crops becomes, a fourth-ring Science and Development tech is too high a price to pay. To make it worthwhile, we first need to give Adaptive Colonies something else to make it worthwhile: I'd personally get rid of Applied Casamir Effect and give its unlocks to Adaptive Colonies (that seems more appropriate in terms of flavor, too), but even that might not be enough to justify the tech. Once we do find a way to make the tech worth researching, we have to make the improvement worth building. I'd divide its industry cost by four and change its food yield to something like +50 food with an additional +20 per sterile planet. This may seem drastic, but the idea is to justify the strategic resource cost and fact that we're researching a food-focused technology in the late game by having a very industry-efficient improvement that helps marginal systems and those with low food production catch up to better-developed ones settled earlier on account of their higher-quality planets.

-Cosmetic Genetics runs into the same issue of beinf on a fourth-ring Sceince and Development tech that doesn't do much else. Maybe the tech merge onto Adaptive Technologies is enough, maybe it needs another +1 population on sterile.

-Body Language Institute is just bizarre. A 10% bonus to influence is tiny until you have a system producing at least high hundreds in influence, but if you have a system like that, you don't really need any more. I see two paths forward. One is to make it a unique improvement with a much higher percentage bonus (somewhere from 50% to 100%), possibly in conjunction with an increased industry and resouce cost. The other is to switch to a flat or per population influence yield.

I'm not sure about Wellbeing Foundation, Autonomous Administration or military improvements. Approval is usually something you have handled by the time of fourth-ring techs, and it's hard to say too much about combat in the mid-late game when the AI isn't a credible threat by that point.